What is Love?

About 5 years ago, still living in Los Angeles, while driving down 91, we passed a billboard that said I love Compton.  Puzzled, my boys were like “Why would anybody love Compton? ” They had been there a few times for doctors appointments, during our harder times and at times, for my work.  They knew it to be run down, scary-ish.  Many homeless people and loose dogs in need.  That question was such a blessing and opening to a profound conversation.  I surprised myself by being able able to explain to them the difference between liking a person, place, or thing and loving it.  I explained how sometimes we do not like each other one bit, but we always want what is best for each other and value working towards the best possible outcome. That this billboard is paid for by a group of people committed to elevating the quality of life for all people in this struggling community.  Love is a verb and often has little to do with our feelings and more to do with our values.  Love is honest, and kind–it is a way of being in the world.  Some people LOVE tacos or burgers and fast cars.  While we might enjoy these things, we love and care for people, places, and things because it is right and it is our purpose.  Some people run around HATING snakes, bugs, and broccoli.  But we do not hate, maybe just do not prefer.  We do not wish ill on them or need to destroy them.  We hate unkindness and dishonesty.  And yet we can love others(maybe from a safe distance) who behave in these ways.  We belong to each other.  All of us.  Everyone and all living things deserve to have their most basic needs met.  To get in the way of that is spiteful unloving. (more…)

A Letter to My Sons

To My Darling Sons,

Love is a promise, not an emotionIt hurts knowing how I burden you daily with my deep seeded angst from having come from the family, which I do.  And yet, I cannot unhook from it enough to do otherwise.  I fled here/them half my life ago committed to not returning to this and them.  I rarely spoke of my mother and never of my sister because I wanted to spare you the knowledge of the dysfunction from which you come.  But since our relocation to this side of the country and proximity to them, you have not been spared.  You recognized at the onset they were not safe and I am not proud to have bribed and begged you to hug and be physically close to them-hoping pathetically, that if they could fully feeeeel the magic of you…maybe it would soften them.  And that was, in a way, using you.  I never threatened, shamed, or guilted you for not wanting to touch and be touched to but I did encourage something I very much disagree with, unwanted touching.  It is never acceptable or necessary.  EVER.

Choose peace. Work for Peace and Connection.

I was sad and angry in ways that defy articulation, for most of my life, and had been raised to judge that, rather than to examine and heal from it.  With your father’s sisters in and out of his and each other’s lives for years at a time, I did not want you to add anyone to your world who might re-enforce the idea that people will love you and leave you when you displease them.   It is why I waited more than a year to share you with Sweet Greg.  I know beyond doubt, that he will only love you and me, and he will do so unconditionally.  With him, I am 100% certain.  He is safe, wholesome, kind, benevolent beyond words, abnormally so.

While I cannot give you a happier mother and I cannot provide you a different family experience, I hope you will always remember the relationships and loving people I intentionally brought into our lives. I have surrounded you with only deeply trusted others, who would do anything for you and for us as a family. I am so sorry I cannot heal fast enough to spare you my depression and anxiety of more than 40 years.  I am sorry I have leaked on to you the depth of my pain, along with the frequently spoken commitment to make certain I tell you again and again that IT IS NOT YOU.  It is me, my brokenness–and it is THEM.   You did not cause or imagine it and you can not fix it, no matter how  wonderful you are.

Over exposure to people who don’t mind hurting you will break a person.  Please continue believing your gut.  You know what feels good, right, kind, and true.  Your bodies and your spirits know.  Because of life-long debilitating sadness, I have had to learn many things late in life about how to care for myself so I can live a better life and share with you a better way than the one in which I was raised.  To do this, I must have space from those who not only make me sad, but then judge and persecute me for my grieving process.  I am sorry for the loss of your

I believe I began as a very kind and sensitive child. I remained sensitive but learned some very cruel ways of being. So grateful to be unlearning. Breaking the cycle and raising lil love warriors and citizens of humanity.  Stay kind and true, sweet boys.

innocence and the conflict you must face each time THEY choose to gather as if it is normal and loving.  I know it hurts you to participate in the divisive and unwholesome arrangement.  Sadly, your only choices afterwards, are: to keep it from me –which would separate us and weaken our bond or to share it and helplessly witness my reaction of pain.  I have to believe the lessons here are valuable to each of us, at least to those of us open to learning(each of you and me)  I love you so much.  If I could change one thing, it would be my inability to stop myself from suffering, not because I can’t take it but because it costs you when mommy is too tangled up in despair to make room for joy.  How can I lead you into joyful lives when I, myself, cannot model one for you?

I am a work in progress. I love you.  I will make better mistakes today than yesterday.  Tons of them.  I will always be willing to change and do better, and never blame you for who I am or how I handle myself. I am sorry that your families create this conflict and confusion for you.  I am powerless to change that.   I will never give up on changing the things I can.

I treasure how much we laugh together, how much of me you do get to know, our countless and always funny inside jokes, as well as our talks through things that are more difficult than funny.  I hope I don’t ruin that with my despair—since apparently that is how I forfeitted my family of origin.

I do believe that you know whom you can count on and go to with your most precious tender thoughts and fears.  You know who OUR people are.  They are the ones who support us as a family and would do nothing to further divide us. Wholesome benevolent love is much greater than blood.  So sad that your grandmother and two aunts have positioned them selves as walls and not bridges for our little family.  It is all that they know and the best they can do.  It is very hurtful and I wished I could protect you from it.  Because they are entrenched in a culture where there are the excluders and the excluded.  I wish to be neither, just as I wish for you to choose neither.  I understand why your dad works to remain in the good graces of the collective.  I feel bad for him too.  Of them all, he seems the only one with hope to rise above.

I love you.  I will continue, for all of my days changing the things I can and trying to accept the unacceptable and the unchangeable.

Love you,

Mommy

Abuse is Abuse

Sound Familiar? These are Big Red Flag StatementsSound familiar? So, this is my modified version of the Narcissists Prayer. I have re-evaluated my need to label others as addicts or narcissists.  In my attempt to recover, I found myself needing to know “but whyyyyy???”  And the singular answer of “because I suck” is no longer acceptable to me.  My upbringing taught me over decades of collective attitudes and actions, that any harsh treatment of me was either →imagined →fabricated, or →well earned.  And that is 100% deranged and untrue.  AND–It stands to reason that if I am willing to believe I can earn abuse or cause someone else to mistreat me, you know what else I believe…that another person may earn abuse or cause me to mistreat them.  

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A Letter From My Sons

Dear Aunt Catherine,

Spending time with you makes us feel bad; bad about you, bad about our mom, our grandmother, your daughters, and bad about our dad.  Being in the middle stinks.  Upending our family in this way makes you enemy#1–we would have preferred  a different experience of you. Required participation in something that causes our mother pain–  Being made repeatedly to hug and to sit close, while sternly encouraged by our dad to  smile on command also feels awful.  We believe that hugs are reserved for people of trust.  How can we trust someone who does this to our mother, OUR family?  We are just children.  Why would you bring us into this?  Do you have any idea how much pain you bring to everyone but you and our dad?

Also, we find your behavior towards him embarrassing.  We get it.   You like him and want him to like you back.  He probably enjoys spending time with you because you have expensive things and guns  AND it mostly, it feels like another win for him in divorce.  He still enjoys winning, over our mom.  We don’t want him to win or make her lose…we want them to work together as our parents.  We deserve cohesive co-parents.  Right?  Your behavior suggests to us that we do not.

A letter from you to our mother, when after her miscarriage while visiting in 2007, she declined the invite to your trick or treat parade– and you responded with this. Quit dividing people.  Try being kind.  Please.

Your relationship with our dad adds tension between our mother and father and escalates their difficulty to co-parent us as a team.  They are divorced. It is hard enough!  You didn’t even know our dad before our parents awful divorce and our move here.  Developing a relationship with him while not speaking to our mom makes no good sense. It can be explained as nothing wholesome at all.  Purely divisive and hostile, very damaging to our parents as a unit.

Betrayal. He likes to spend time with you, because he does not know anyone here in Charlotte and you are the only woman consistently fawning over him.  Maybe if you left him alone, he would meet someone.  With your

daughters, we can not feel close to them because our energy goes entirely into pretending that we are behaving as normal and loving.  And why must we, talk to you– but your daughters not to our mom?   It all seems very intentionally mean-spirited- spiteful.  Bullyish.  We are reprimanded when we don’t smile and act happy FOR you, so we do our best to please our dad which means performing for you…then we go home feeling crummy about it– to a mother who tries and mostly fails to accept what is happening.  All she would like is to be able to parent us with our dad without added stress.

Your mom is yours.  You belong to each other.  We get it.  Go Be family.  Enjoy.

You possibly think you are creating closeness for us with you and our grandmother.  Maybe you honestly cannot see how it is not possible for us– to feel love and connection with people who divide our tiny family further and whom don’t mind alienating and wrecking our mom.  Her greatest fear is that we will grow up believing that it is ok for brothers/siblings/family to do things of this nature—to anyone.

Make things right with our mother or let US be.  Any connection to our dad’s family is totally inappropriate.  Our mother deserves peace.  Anyone thinking otherwise, is not genuinely interested in loving US.  Please.  Just stop.  Just because you can do a thing, does not mean you should do it.

You can do better.  We cannot.  We don’t get a choice.  You are hurting us.  Respect us enough to STOP.

FROM: Our mother’s sons

Courage to Change

The Classic Fauxpology—CAUTION RED FLAG–Turn and walk away.

I get that my mother did the best she could…and STILL–what happened to me is not right or acceptable.  I know we differ in many ways, she and I,  one of the more pronounced ways, is that if and when I am struggling to understand and be present for either of my children, I count on friends, whom I call family, to stand in that gap, not to align with me against my sons.  My mother’s need to be right outweighed her need for connection with and protection of me.  She invited others to align with her, to shame or frighten me into something other…and I sure did become something other than what I was born to be in this world. Ashamed.  Angry.  Disconnected. Broken AF. (more…)

happy mothers’ day

Is it unreasonable to wish for a mother who would not contribute to or support initiatives that are guaranteed to escalate tension between her grandsons’ parents?  IS IT?  I knew my ex and sister had been communicating last week and awaited the fallout.  And it unfolded, as predicted.  He did something shitty that cost me money and time and then pretended to be mad at me?  He cannot in good conscience align with her and then also act right with me.  She— has no conscience and I expect nothing more or less from her.  Sadly, I still cling to some fantasy that she might make an effort toward family closeness she claims to desire.  Total horse-shit, they don’t want closeness, they want compliance and reverence.  Healing takes work, while dominance and entitlement are par for the course.

I would like to enjoy Mothers Day with my sons and chances are good, like all other “special days”, I will struggle more than usual.  A shame for them to be raised a mother in despair.  Loving, often present, compassionate and always empathetic and willing to listen, while mostly joyless.  I think the joy-center in my brain was crushed at birth.  I do laugh and enjoy, but, honestly, there may never come a day where I do not feel mentally whipped from so many years of betrayal.  The unnecessary addition of hostility/ tension in co-parenting as a result of their triangulation with him just sucks.  You know how when you are bout to screw some one over, you behave as if you are mad at them.  Cuz, how else do you justify?  It is that –constantly.  I am so done with people screwer overERs.  There is no justification.  I don’t even care if you are legit mad.  Screwing people over is something I no longer can tolerate by those over the age of 14 or not heavily addicted to drugs or mentally ill.  Technically, those are the only people who only do regular mental fuckery and enjoy it and then deny it or find a way to shift blame for their own hurtful choices.    Grrr

Narcissist's Prayer

Mothers Day Schmothers Day

The Zero-Sum Game–Everyone Loses

I cannot help but marvel at how “they” manufacture chaos and trouble so they can dole out punishment, while denying their anger.  A part of my mind says don’t speak or write about it, they will like that—making them feel all important and impactful.  The other part of me says “fuck them, I want the world to know what twisted assholes they can be”. And the recovery part of me says “Write about it if it helps you to sift and heal.  Share it to help others on a similar journey”. (more…)

Every Time I Judge

I used to have immense shame over how I struggled and how I felt, like I was embarrassed for my feelings.  WTF? Difficult feelings were for judging not having or coping with.  And I fruitlessly sought approval from the most emotionally vacant and disapproving. And, I too learned to become disapproving of myself and others, particularly those in struggle, having needs or ideas different from my own, so basically everybody.

We judge when we are afraid.  It is easier to look, point and judge than to look inward and ask, why does that make me so uncomfortable?  By judging and disliking someone, is that proof of their badness and unlikability?  No, it is evidence of an inability to be compassionate and loving.  Behaviors can be bad.  Choices can be bad.  But people are not bad.  Even assholes are just people who cannot yet see the changes they are being called to make.  Is using the word asshole, a sign of judgment?  Probably so.  I am a work in progress.

I do believe that some people are inherently broken and dark hearted and knowingly do harmful things in order to get ahead or to be right and lacking in the ability or will to self reflect and elevate their spiritual presence.  I don’t judge them.  I just give them a lot of space and send them light and love from over here, when I am feeling humble and generous. hahaha.  Again, a work in progress.  The struggle is real.  Assholes are real.  Feelings are real.  Recovery is real—#odaat

Recovery Celebrations

I was alllwaaaays melting down-losing my shit. I had not learned healthy coping skills. For my first 40 years, secondary feelings about my feelings kicked my ass.  In our home feelings were for losers, and for judging. —I felt shitty because life was painful and experiencing pain, duress, and discontent was treated harshly-
generally shamed, punished, gossiped about, and banished.  I was sad about feeling sad and scared I might get scared and tense about getting tense and fully ashamed of it all.  Being name-called and demanded to lighten up OR snap out of it never seemed to do the trick.  Now, I allow myself to have feelings without worrying about having them, and the difficult ones are shorter in duration.

Recovery helps me to unlearn the myths of shame and unworthiness and fear of feelings, and the price for having them–disconnection (from those whom I was never authentically connected, anyway).  Now I am mostly only afraid of being placed in proximity to those who righteously attempt to punish, judge, and challenge my emotional experiences.  When given the choice, I only #gowherethelove is.  Life feels more manageable and even enjoyable this way.  Byeeeeee!

Best Days of Our Lives

Last night, Bryan Adams’ song “Best Days of Our Lives” played on the radio.  For a moment I felt nostalgic, reminded of senior year, summer in particular where we were very actively drinking and chasing boys and good feelings.  Then, I remembered, that I was fucken terrified and miserable and always in one of three ways:

  • about to lose my shit for reasons, of which, even I was not certain
  • losing my shit, for reasons, of which, even I was not certain
  • hiding humiliated, because I had lost my shit, for reasons, of which, even I was not certain

I recognize now that I suffer severe anxiety which was not well tolerated in my family and which made me an easy target for the intolerant rage that pulsed through our “home”. Being targeted rather than comforted caused me despair/depression in addition to heightening my troublesome anxiety.  I was depressed about being anxious and anxious about being depressed and never unaware of the price I would pay when I could not be bullied or shamed out of it.

The best days of my life- I must believe are ahead of me.  If no, shoot me now–a request to which my family would eagerly respond(but only cuz I asked).  But seriously, I think the best days of my life were 3 years ago, when my boys and I moved cross country to be present and to serve my ailing mother, moving here while we were still not speaking- totally willing to show TF up and do as needed.  Being of service to her felt right.  When my ex-husband followed a few months later and we began working together as strongly dedicated CO-parents, a fixed family, more than a broken family, I was thrilled.  From having an alarm installed to keep him out, to offering him keys to use my condo as needed, was an immense step for us.  Our marriage was troubled from the start.  Our divorce was hell —and here we were. Miracles.  Sharing responsibilities, expenses, and even meals.  Those were the best days of my life.  My boys were over the moon with the new collaborative forces.

Relocating cross country: 1) to support my mother and 2) so that my ex could afford to purchase a home was the most wholesome badass move of my life.  Spiritually driven choices. Having the courage to plan a move cross country(to the land I fled and swore to never return) with my ex, to be near the two women(with whom I was not on speaking terms) who terrified me more than any other humans, is nothing short of God’s grace.  My sister set into action a plan which desecrated that.  Initially, this caused me to feel unlovable, unworthy, and disgraced, one more time.  I totally lost my shit–again.  But then, I knew.  And I realized, that her behaviors cannot disgrace me.  Her behaviors, in no way, speak to the quality of my character.  They certainly affect me and have hurt my children.  I fully can acknowledge that but will not take responsibility for what she DID and SAID repeatedly.

(Seemingly random non-sequitur paragraph) My aunt emailed recently, three times in one day asking to know how I am doing.  I feel stronger and more sane, less like losing my shit from that free floating anxiety I feel anytime I engage “them”.  But it felt wrong to not respond.  I thanked her for thinking of me and told her all the ways we were thriving as a family, including and especially, the currently restored collaborative efforts in coparenting with the boys’ father.  Then, crickets, not a peep since.  That shit right there, makes me feel crazy AF.  Similarly, in January, she asked to meet for brunch and said she wanted to see me and when I apologized for being unable, I did not hear again from her until this most recent email.  Against the advice of trusted others, I responded and am guilty of expectation of something different.  Is that hope or foolishness or just the broken wanting parts of me that have not fully accepted what it has always meant for me trying to live, as a part of this “family”?(This paragraph seems random but it is not, to me)

Lat night, I was reflecting how one of my sister’s favorite things to say when she is angry at me, is “It is not always about you”.  To hear this makes me feel foolish and shameful.  Of course it is not always about me. But when you suddenly stop responding to me as if I have not spoken or that I do not exist.  I take that shit personally..  But you know what, you are right—that is not about me.  That is about her way of dealing with whatever it is she has going on in her head. Now, as I reflect back, I see how I was blamed for the unfortunate feelings and behaviors of those around me.  So other people’s emotional unavailability and harshness is about me, but my unique needs for food, space, or sleep, my birthday and Christmas gifts and food offerings appear to have little to do with me.  I still cannot make sense of this.  I cannot accept it–in that I choose now to NOT submit myself for it.  I cannot change it– so– all that is left to do is to give my self the necessary space from it.  Grieving is where I am currently, in my state of recovery.  Grieving for the little Magda Gee that tried to cope in an unmanageable and sick system.  Confused and with no healthy coping skills or solid ground to stand on.  Grieving that the best days of my life came in my late 40s and were righteously snatched.

Placing my ex husband in a situation to choose between my estranged family and me is fucked up.  He is broken and lonely and will always have residual anger for me.  Placing our small boys in the center of this divisive and diminishing scheme feels impossible to forget or forgive.  I am accepting the pain–but not the disgrace.  Even through all of this, recovery allowed me to resist telling my ex or my sister about themselves.  I pray that we may work it out in a more wholesome way or leave each other to our families.  Have your family.  And I will have mine.  Please.